Okay, bear with me as I think this out, it’s not a proposal (yet).
I was reading a couple of science-y threads in MaPSIMS this morning and was thinking about what a strange place that was to park them. And that got me remembering some interesting papers I’d read that I’d planned on posting, but I didn’t like that forum for that either. And then I wondered about a Science forum.
Here were some arguments I went through:
We already have a bunch of forums. (We could just move QZ under it and we’ll have the same number)
So many science questions already go into FQ. (And that’s so weird. Someone unintentionally spawns a 996-post thread about “who was that guy on The Tonight Show?”, clearly a factual question, and it goes into Cafe Society, as do basically all similar arts factual questions)
It won’t get much traffic. (And that’s the one I think would kill it, as it did that Barn forum)
That’s all I’ve got (those three, plus the feeling that MaPSIMS is a strange place for hard science discussion). Anyone have feelings either way?
A thread about science is either a question, in which case it fits perfectly well in FQ, or it’s a news story, in which case it fits in MPSIMS. And you might think that a science news story in MPSIMS is odd, but that’s where all news goes: A science thread is no more out of place there than a thread about the Russia-Ukraine War.
We don’t like to create extra forums in general. QZ was a very special circumstance.
But the tags would fill the same niche. We can create a science tag very easily and it would work as a sub-forum. Especially as Science thread could be in FQ, IMHO, MPSIMS & GD.
Should the tag just say science-math or science-something? possibly science-engineering?
The other half of this would be pointing out some of the science threads to me, especially the MPSIMS one, then I will tag them.
I should add, that if we had tags when QZ was created, we probably would have just tagged the threads instead of creating a special forum. That seems to be the general take from some modloop discussions.
Thanks for the answers so far, they’re informative!
Well, there’s a third category - I read a lot of papers/studies and was in this case thinking about sharing those to generate discussion. But I suppose those can be tossed in there as well.
Depends, if it is not breaking news and you want a discussion on the study, I think IMHO is actually a better fit. If you’re asking questions and looking for factual answers then FQ. You kind of have to decide how you want the thread to work. Bloggish, hard facts or sharing (hopefully) informed opinions.
I’m also thinking about adding an electrical-plumbing tag. We get a lot of questions on these 2 subjects and there’s a lot of knowledge on the board to answer them.
Apparently I already have tools-electric-diy, so I have to make better use of it.
FQ is not that active and there is room to cover those questions. Better sometimes than in other threads like the Foundation thread which turned into a long discussion on statistical probabilities. A new thread in FQ could have been broken off to continue that discussion.
If there were a science forum, it could get some traffic and encourage people to start more science threads. I think I’d certainly be inclined to try posting more about newly published research if there were a good place for it to go.
The fact that we persist with this strange arrangement really does not encourage the posting of news threads. Are we really supposed to post about the publication of a major research paper in a forum with this title? I think I’d try to make it work in IMHO or something at present.
I really wish the mods would revisit stripping out serious content from a forum with this title.
Whatever backronym may have been invented, that forum is still the home of random stuff that is actually mundane and pointless that does not belong in the same place as more serious content.
science-math has 10 threads assigned currently. I’ll happily add others linked here, but mining MPSIMS for the threads is more than even my OCDish inclinations can do.
Hard to believe MPSIMS was renamed nearly a year ago, I thought it was more recent.
All of our forums contain a mix of mundane stuff and serious content. And I, for one, do not want to be the one to moderate content for its seriousness.
Moderators constantly relocate threads that are in the wrong forum. If you don’t think it’s important to have a forum for more serious science content (or indeed breaking news) and that it belongs with stuff like personal blog threads, this board will attract less science content.
Advantages to the current system.
OP controls to some degree the type of discussion with the forum choice. Factual Questions FQ is fact based, keep the conjecture and dumb jokes out please. In My Humble Opinion IMHO is hopefully informed opinions. breaking-news Breaking News in MPSIMS should be news and points tied to said. Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share MPSIMS is indeed bloggish and very conversational and open to dumb jokes. Great Debates GD would be if the OP finds parts of the study debatable, maybe questioning methodology or the like.
As we saw with The Quarantine Zone QZ, the unified forum for a narrow topics has issues where all threads end up MPSIMSish. Which was fine for most, but not all.
If we did a science forum, we would probably need to ensure the OPs included what style of thread they expected it to take.
In the meantime, hopefully the science-math tag can help.
If that’s what the OP wanted. But there’s no reason why a thread on a specific science topic could not be more wide-ranging, including both news and related factual information and opinion.
And of course the fact that the change in nominal acronym has not been associated with any actual change away from the original “mundane and pointless” characterization is evidenced by the fact that mods have said that the Board rule about informative thread titles is not enforced in that forum. Is a forum where clickbait thread titles are allowed really a credible place for science threads?
I think you said this recently in another place, but i frequently edit thread titles in MPSIMS to make them more informative, and there’s obviously some title that bugged you, but I’m curious what it was.
The proposal is for a science forum, not for a serious-threads forum. If we were to create a science forum, then that would also be the place for frivolous science threads. Which we have plenty of.